Osman Can Yerebakan

Effortlessly dispersed on an otherwise blank sheet, words ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘all sons and daughters’ and ‘regardless of age or place’ utter in the viewers’ mouths, debuting a startling poem brimming with countless untold tales of new territories and fresh beginnings.

Installation view of Jesse Chun: On Paper

In On Paper, her first exhibition at SoHo’s Spencer Brownstone Gallery, the Brooklyn-based artist Jesse Chun introduces a serene ambiance composed of two series, Landscape and Form, as well as blueprints, a wall-spanning installation of vellum paper blueprints that at first sight seems to be solely composed of arbitrary geometric forms. Akin to other works on view, the said piece stems from immigration forms the artist collected over the years to strip them off from their utilitarian aspects and decontextualize their raison d’être. Freed from the burden of words asking personal questions or dictating requirements, elegantly orchestrated abstract and minimal forms illustrate lurking possibilities beneath these visa forms.

Jesse Chun, Form #2 (diptych), 2016

Furthering the depiction of such narrative possibilities and unexplored territories is a series of landscapes in mild tones of pink, green and blue, illustrating otherworldly panoramas—snowy peaks piercingly erecting towards the sky, tempestuous waterfalls bursting with potency or voluminous branches blanketed by blooming flowers. Perplexing charm of these utopian views emerge from pages of passports showcasing landmarks from the countries they belong to. Blown out to striking dimensions, these landscapes of archival pigment prints allow viewers enjoy their unique patterns originally created to serve as watermarks in order to reduce the risk of forging.

Jesse Chun, Landscape #10, 2014

Jesse Chun, Form #4, 2016

Paper no longer simply is the bearer of information regarding one’s immigration status or travels abroad, yet molds into a platform to further experiment for Chun. Indicating the separation between that of actuality and of the officially stated, the expression on paper aids the artist to depict this duality. Under the helm of her re-contextualizing project, papers, each originating from a bureaucratic core, ask questions about belonging, alienation and drifting—to a place, to an identity and to a story. Pursuing a home that is ephemeral, fluid and ubiquitous, the artist invents poems, both verbal and pictorial, embedded in unintended structures.

Installation view of Jesse Chun: On Paper

Jesse Chun: On Paper will remain on view at Spencer Brownstone Gallery until September 17, 2016.

Erica Baum is one of the most intriguing photography artists working today. Baum’s scrutinizing of optic limitations images and words perpetuate bears riveting results, in which their commonly attributed potentials shatter to unravel new territories for ‘looking’. Experiencing her Naked Eye, Dog Ear or Card Catalogue series, viewers discover new scenarios, where the notion of gazing is redefined.

Erica Baum, Pamela, 2015

Using found sources including paper back books or index cards, Baum charges existing materials with uninvented narratives. Gestures such as folding or flipping aid the artist to build these alternate possibilities: a poem comes to light from the folded corner of a book revealing the otherwise covered next page or two curious eyes staring from a black and white noir with beamingly colored edges catch a sight of their onlooker. I’ve had the privilege to ask Baum a few questions about her striking practice:

— In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes separates photographic experience into two categories: studium and punctum, comparing the shift from the first towards the latter to an arrow piercing into his chest. Your works seem to stem from studium, which refers to firsthand informative or documentary photography, and transform into what Barthes would define as the subjective and capturing state, which is punctum. How do you see your creative process in response to Barthes’ concept?

My source materials, printed matter, linguistic and typographic traces of systems and structures reflect the circulation and dissemination of information in our shared popular culture. This is the ‘studium’.

I navigate intuitively, trying to corral and align my designated variables harnessing moments that suggest meanings beyond their original situations. The act of selecting and partially de-contextualizing the images could be considered the ‘punctum’. This is when the encounter with the subject transcends the ‘studium’. But there’s always a dialogue between the two.

Erica Baum, Enclosing, 2010

— Naked Eye Anthology, Dog Ear and Newspaper Clippings series all manifest performative associations with paper, involving various acts such as flipping, folding or cutting. In other words, you engage with the tactile quality of paper as much as you do with its utilitarian component of storing information or image. What does paper mean to you in terms of signifying a territory to constantly revisit?

I’m looking for language in a visual field and most often it’s paper that provides that field. In one of my earliest series, ‘Card Catalogues’ I became aware of the hands behind the system. The librarians’ hand shaping and organizing and the researchers’ hand, pulling out files and rifling through cards. When I started that project in the mid 1990’s, it was intended to reflect a quotidian relationship to the library. But very quickly it became clear to me that libraries were decommissioning the card catalogues replacing them with computers.

In the ‘Dog Ear’ series I draw attention to the act of folding down a corner to save your place in a book. These moments spontaneously generate new experiences of language and meaning. They are specific to physical books rather than ebooks. Paper in both these cases provides a space for a physical encounter that can be captured photographically.

Erica Baum, The Public Imagination, 2010

— In your work, you celebrate the power of words; however, you also strip them off of their traditional raison d’être. They no longer stand to ‘define’ or ‘mean’ what they originally did. Elena Ferrante calls prose a chain that pulls water up from the bottom of a well. Do you think you break this chain or rearrange its rings?

Often I’m treating words as things to be rearranged and repositioned exacting new meanings, not nonsense but a different sense. I always include enough photographic description, texture dimension, to allow an aspect of the original source to linger consciously.

Erica Baum, Untitled (Reason), 1997

— Your practice involves peeling off an image or text in order to juxtapose undiscovered narratives. Do you think those narratives are already embedded in there or you create them anew? In other words, how do you define the difference between looking and seeing?

I’m often drawn to photographs of people expressing an emotion, appearing to think and consider. In the ‘Naked Eye’ series this collection of images becomes a kind of indexical typology of narrative types, incomplete and non comprehensive, suggesting narrative rather than creating specific narratives and in that sense relates to narrative as a structure composed of types similar to the collection of types of art in my ‘Frick’ series and types of categories and subjects in my ‘Card Catalogue’ series. Hopefully the ‘looking’ and the ‘seeing’ are inextricably tangled up.

Erica Baum, Smash, 2011

— As an artistic practice, photography is already far from solely ‘capturing’ the moment. In line to its merger with Conceptualism, photography is susceptible to issues surrounding conceptual art—visual narrative, practical execution and aesthetic challenges just to name a few. How do you see this dialogue between two disciplines?

Conceptualism is a part of all artistic practice. Whether consciously by intent or consciously in it’s reception there is always a platform where meaning resides.

Solemn, contemplative and evasive; the arresting art of Bas Jan Ader—the Dutch-born and Los Angeles-based artist who sailed to an eternal journey at the age of thirty-three from Massachusetts in attempt to orchestrate what would be his grandest work of art—is not an easy one to immerse in.

Bas Jan Ader, Fall 2, 1970

Still comparatively foreign to the U.S. audience, Ader delivered a modest yet profound body of work in his short career before its premature conclusion upon his vanishing in open seas in 1975. In this sense, Metro Pictures’ compact exhibition dedicated to the artist’s black and white photographs as well as his videos and installation works comes as a startling surprise during the lazy summer season.

Bas Jan Ader, Fall 1, 1970

While autobiographies play crucial roles in understanding and interpreting artists’ works, Ader’s is a unique case. Witnessing his Calvinist minister father’s execution by the Nazis at the age of two for housing Jewish refugees during WWII, Ader grew up with the breath of death and loss on his neck. Eventually, coming in terms with what life had in store for him, the artist utilized his art as a meditative force, peeling off the layers of mundane rituals to unveil embedded peculiarities of the human condition.

Bas Jan Ader, I’m too sad to tell you, 1971

Until his grand finale, which still remains a mystery in many aspects (Here Is Always Somewhere Elseis a 2007 documentary investigating Ader’s disappearance), Ader contemplated issues of existence, loss and, whatever stands in between through subtle gestures, eliminating the distinction of art from reality. Thus, his Fall series, in which he releases himself from rooftops while sitting on a chair or plunges into the Amsterdam canal on his bicycle, expands both directions: scornful and giddy akin to Chaplin slapsticks, these videos emphasize the ridicule beneath the mundane; however, in contrast, there lies a severe portrayal of agony and juxtaposition of nihilism experienced by a distressed mind. When observed as an act of despair and surrender, Ader’s performances and their documentations guide their audience through the gnarly paths of an artist’s struggles to survive while facing existentialist angst. Furthermore, these works are pure manifestations of the ability to feel blue amidst an order that constantly facilitates gaiety.

Bas Jan Ader, Please don’t leave me, 1969

I’m too sad to tell you, arguably his most iconic piece in terms of delivering his artistic voice in the simplest yet grasping sense, boldly claims one’s inherent right to be sad opposed to tireless efforts generated by society for beguilement. In this video Ader is seen profoundly sobbing, omitting any explanation that triggers such profound heartache. Rather, he simply embraces the act of crying as coping mechanism while the definition of video art was beginning to shape in the early 70s and other artists were chasing convoluted methods to strike. Eventually, condemnation of crying by masculinity norms receives its share of ridicule, so do the time’s heated arguments on the nature and content of video art.